What Makes a Popular Book?

If you’ve ever read through a few classic books,
you may have noticed some discrepancies.

Some are engaging, deep, or easy to read, while others seem so bad you wonder how people ever enjoyed them.

But why is that?

What exactly about these books that makes them enjoyable or unbearable?

What allows some books to hold up through the year while others fall out of favor?

To investigate the popularity of classic books in the modern day, we will be looking at 19 novels and stories published around the 19th century and comparing their features and current popularity based on modern Goodreads ratings.

We will start by examining the structure of these books.

Rating by Length of book

Here we can see that well rated books generally tend to be longer.
But we should take a closer look.

There is an upward trend the the points, suggesting a possible relationship.
However, we can’t be sure given that moving just a few points disturbs this trend.

Paragraph Length

Longer paragraph seem linked to more poorly rated books








The scatterplot corroborates this.


There appears to be a trend for book with longer paragraphs to be less popular.
This pattern holds up even if a few points are removed.

Word length

There’s a loose trend of books with shorter words being higher rated, but it isn’t strong enough to be reliable.

Dialog

There’s some trend of books with more dialog being higher rated, though not always reliable.

While we were able to identify some trends for book rating from the structural data, it certainly leaves a lot unexplained.

How about the book “demographics”? Could this tell us more?

Author Gender

Not much to be seen here

Year of Publication

No clear trends here either

So book demographics didn’t clear much up

Could the emotional content of book explain more about their popularity?

Positive vs Negative Emotion scale

The ratings show no clear preference for positive or negative language alone.

But what if we look at individual emotions?

Emotional scores

Some emotions have a clear correlation with Rating,
like joy, anticipation, and trust

But others are more complicated,
like anger, disgust, and sadness

Looking at the points as a whole, the relationship doesn’t look strong.

However, if we exclude 5 specific books the rest follow a strong trend.

In fact, those books are similarly located for all of the emotional scores.

Could the overall quantity of emotion be an important predictor?

It seems that this phenomena is limitted to just these few books rather than being a general trend

Case Study

So then, why are books like Brothers Karamazov and Anne of Green Gables so much high rated than other similar books?

Lets compare the emotional composition of Anne of Green Gables and The Awakening. Both are dramas with a young women protagonist, written by female authors around the end of the 19th century. However, Anne of Green Gables was an immediate hit and remains highly rated today, while the Awakening was criticized when first published, only gained some popularity later in the 20th century and remains lower rated today.

Here we can see that Anne of Green Gables has some features that were more associated with higher rating, such as higher word count, lower word length, and more dialog.

However, it also has longer paragraphs which was more associated with lower ratings.

	Anne of Green Gables	The Awakening
Rating	4.31	3.68
Publication Year	1908	1899
Author Gender	Female	Female
Word count	93740	45270
Chapter count	39	40
Average Word Length	4.96	5.21
Average Words per Paragraph	56.54	44.89
Dialog to Paragraph Ratio	0.4914	0.3476

The clearest difference between the two is the higher emotional content in Anne of Green Gables.

This is especially true in relation to emotions like trust, joy, and anticipation, which were correlated with higher book popularity.

Conclusion

We can see some trends with Anne of Green Gables and the Awakening that help explain their popularity now, but it doesn’t tell us the whole story.

Why was the Awakening so criticized at its publication while Anne of Green Gables was loved? Just because it had less emotion and slightly longer words?

To full explain trends in popularity, we need something else: Context.

The awakening was criticized when it came out around the turn of the 20th century because it depicted a woman going against gender roles and was too dark and ‘immoral’ for people at that time, but was later picked up in the second half of the 20th century as society shifted in that direction, before losing popularity again as the social movement became old news and people started finding it boring.

Anne of Green Gables, on the other hand, was a wholesome story that didn’t meet the same complications.

In the end, we can look at what makes up a popular book, but as seen with The Awakening and Anne of Green Gables, with just that it is difficult to capture all the context and intricacies that truly make a book popular.